Since I recently had some time over from freelancing/consulting duties (I am still available for hire though), I figured I’d try to breathe some life into an old favorite Rails project of mine.

Longtime readers may remember Collaboa, a project that started out as a CMS of sorts for a community site with articles, forums and so on.
But some time ago I decided to take it in a slightly different direction, while still having the same ultimate goal; collaboration among developers.

The plan is simply to turn it into the ultimate Rails-based “project tracker”, featuring Subversion integration, a bugtracker, continuos integration of builds (e.g. run tests after each commit) and a couple more things I really haven’t decided on yet.

There’s still a long way to go on this, but what I have been working on is the Subversion integration, resulting in a changeset viewer and a repository browser. To do this I had to use the fairly recent addition of the Ruby bindings for Subversion, something which turned into a slight challenge since there’s little documentation and not much else to look at apart from the unit tests and the svnlook.rb/svnshell.rb examples.

But since I started working on my wrapper library (mainly to make things easier) named ActionSubverison, I think I’ve gotten a far better understanding on how the bindings work. Which of course also mean that I’ve realized that the overall design of my wrapper library needs to be severely refactored, since I’ve done a few thing which in retrospective probably isn’t too optimal.

Obligatory screenshots of work-in-progess:

(I realize the some of the above features I’ve implemented could probably interfere with things I’ve said in the past on reinventing the wheel, but that’s ok; I can handle that.)

I’ll try to get some sort of polished “preview release” out there when I’ve rewritten most of ActionSubversion, so that people willing can try out the Subversion specifics and help me spot any bottlenecks and flaws. Of course, those brave enough are welcome to check out the trunk and give it a spin, see the README on how to get things up and running and the TODO for some of the things that needs to be done. Hopefully Collaboa will be able to be self-hosted soon, Collaboa being managed by Collaboa.

Comments:

riffraff Says:

Jun 03 at 21:26
have you considered basing your wrapper library on the Ruby/scm library available on rubyforge?

It would add a great plus to your project allowing it to be compatible with various SCMs and taking advantage of the already large work done by the damagecontrol guys

Jun 04 at 11:36
Yeah, I thought about that for a start riffraff. But I couldn’t figure out an easy way (short of checking out a working copy) to get a repository browser up and running. And I’m not too well known in other SCMs to actually make that work in rscm.

But, it would certainly be a nice thing to have further down the line! Perhaps I could mix and match a bit..

Jun 30 at 15:36
Johan, I must congratulate you on getting the first public release of Collaboa out the door. It looks to be a very nice piece of software. I’ve blogged some thoughts about it on my website